Performance from March 25, 2018 at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin

Message from Julius Eastman (2015) and Hail Mary (1984)

Performance November 3rd at the Wexner Center for the Arts

John Cage: Works for Solo Piano
plus Di Pietro’s Rajas for John Cage Leap Before You Look Performances

Thursday, November 3, 2016 4:30PM
Thursday, November 3, 2016 6:00PM

Join us in the galleries to hear Columbus-based composer, writer, and educator Rocco Di Pietro perform a selection of solo piano works by Black Mountain College teacher and composer John Cage, plus his own Rajas for John Cage. Cage’s work has been a longstanding source of inspiration to Di Pietro, an affinity you’ll hear in his original meditative homage composed for narrator and chamber ensemble. Fusing narration, improvisation, and Cageian structures, Rajas for John Cage offers a unique window into the composer’s life and music, insight that Di Pietro has demonstrated in his book of the same title—a series of story poems that won him a 2012 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. An Ohio Arts Council artist in residence and guest lecturer and composer at Stanford University, Di Pietro is currently an adjunct professor at Columbus State Community College.

"Finale" performance at Stanford University on May 12, 2012

Access easily a selection of classical contemporary music through search engine, discover or research. Listen for free, take a look or buy scores (sheetmusic) online. Composers can submit their work in order to be diffused by BabelScores

Melodia Score

Upcoming Events & News for 2009

Starting in January 2009 Di Pietro will be SICA (Stanford Institute for the Creative Arts) Composer in residence. He will undertake a variety of projects in a campus wide initiative including writing his orchestra piece "Finale.As artist in residence working across disciplines he will write a new piece for the "Wired Sound "ensemble with Chris Chafe,Pauline Oliveros and Chryssie Nanou. As a guest composer he will show his work to Jonathan Berger and Paul De Marinis,and write a new section of the on going cycle: "The Comedy of The Real" for Ge Wang and the Stanford Lap Top Orchestra at CCRMA (Center for Computing, Research, Music and Acoustics). He will also perform in a public concert and seminar of his work.

Releases Now Available

Forthcoming Releases for 2008

Rocco Di Pietro will be performing in New York City at the Roulette Experimental Inter-Media on Saturday, May 26, 2007. This program will feature Kathy Supove, Robert Dick, Larry Marotta, and David Reed. For more information in regards tickets, reservations and directions, please feel free to contact the following number, 212-219-8242.

Di Pietro to premier new composition in New York

Rocco Di Pietro, instructor in Humanities, has composed a new piece for the internationally renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie. The work is called "Rhizome for Evelyn Glennie," and will be premiered at the State University of New York's Buffalo Percussion Ensemble under the direction of Anthony Miranda in 2007.

The composition requires the help of LA sound percussionist Stephen Smith, who is constructing an all-stone instrument to be connected to real-time live electronics.

Di Pietro says the idea for the piece came after his illness with gall stones gave him the idea that "every illness is a musical problem" (Novalis) so the metaphor of stones as drops of consciousness for Evelyn Glennie--someone who uses her other senses to hear--was fitting.

While still a student, Evelyn Glennie learned that she was going deaf. Rather than abandon her study of music, in which she had shown such talent, she instead turned her focus toward percussion instruments and developed her ability to feel the sound through her body.

Evelyn Glennie

Di Pietro to
Teach at Stanford University (CCRMA) This Fall - "Three
way seminar with Chris Chafe, Pauline Oliveros and
Rocco Di Pietro.Read
More >>

Pierre
Boulez is arguably classical music's most important living
composer and conductor. His most famous compositions, the
widely-performed "Le marteau sans ma"tre, Pli
selon pli," and "Le visage nuptial", have
earned him the reputation as a musical provocateur, while
his current role as principle guest conductor of the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra has established him as patriarch and
elder statesman of today's classical music scene. In this
book of dialogues with author Rocco Di Pietro, Mr. Boulez
reveals delightful ideas and insights on composition and
imagination, listening and teaching, and muses on the nature
of youth, communication, and fame. Di Pietro's unusual writing
format allows the reader to more easily understand the complexities
of Boulez's thinking. A firm believer in accidents, he reveals
how his career took shape through a combination of coincidence
and talent. Essential for recent Boulez converts and long
time devotees alike.

Menocchio
was a simple family man, a miller by trade. But he was also
a voracious reader, a man who possessed of an extraordinary
curiosity constructed a radical cosmology and dared to present
it to the world. In 1599, he was burned at the stake as
a heretic. Menocchio is representative of a fascinating
popular history known as micro-storia, which challenges
the nature continental revisionist nature of history. Also
having points of contact with the Annales historians and
the English “history from the bottom up” where
a simple rope maker could educate himself and interact with
the higher world, it is very germane to our students at
Columbus State.

Multiples and The Lost Project is a 2 CD retrospective
of the work of Rocco Di Pietro. It represents at least
twenty years of work in the cross over between electronic,
acoustic, and improvised musics.

You can purchase Multiples and The Lost Project from CDBaby,
EMF, or by calling 1.800.289.6923.

Rocco Di Pietro was born in Buffalo, New York in 1949. He
studied composition and piano with Hans Hagen and Lukas
Foss in Buffalo and at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood.
He studied in New York and Darmstadt with Bruno Maderna
and was a freelance composer for twenty years before earning
degrees from SUNY Buffalo and Vermont College.He became
an interdisciplinary adjunct professor teaching in prisons and
on many college campuses throughout New York, Ohio, and
California. He toured California prisons as artist-in-residence
and conducted four years of interviews in Chicago with Pierre
Boulez. The resulting book, DIALOGUES WITH BOULEZ, was
recently published by Scarecrow Press. He composed Prison
Dirges I for the Kronos String Quartet.
Di Pietro's music has been performed by many musicians in
venues throughout the world. These include: Christiane Edinger,
Christobal Halffter, Lukas Foss, Julius Eastman, Bruno Maderna,
Frances Marie Uitti, Yvar Mikhasoff, Jan Williams, Anthony
Miranda, Gunther Schuller, Dennis Russell Davies, the Buffalo
Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, the
Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra, CETA
Orchestra, Ojai Ensemble Sonor, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra,
Columbus Wind Orchestra, Earlham String Orchestra, the Avant
Collective, and the Madd Lab Orchestra. Venues include: The
Kitchen, La Mama, Bang On A Can Festival, in New York,
Contemporary Music Society of Seoul, South Korea and American
Academy in Rome among others. Recent performances of LOST
have been featured at Dartmouth College and Stanford University.
Recently, his work has developed on several fronts. Sound
text radio works have developed simultaneously with his teaching
at Columbus State College of electronic music and other courses
in the Humanities. These works have been broadcast on radio
stations in Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, New York and in
Europe, in Naples, Rome, Vienna, Prague, Budapest etc.
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LOST
for Christian Boltanski is an ongoing project which
consists of a series of works based on the musical monograms
of lost children. These missing children from the “Have
you seen us?” cards come in the mail from the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 1-800-the lost.

Using
the classic technique developed by Bach, various ensembles
from trios to small orchestras and choruses perform the
child’s name as it is transcribed on the card. The
cards that come in the mail become the “parts.”
The work unfolds by means of a structured and guided improvisation
with the notes as written. The results vary widely from
the different LOST 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

The
work has grown out of my concerns as a social composer
who moonlights as a social worker. As such, it is an attempt
to make connections between art and life. As a community
outreach piece, many of the decisions about which children’s
names to play, and in what order depend on the technical
capabilities of the ensembles at hand – a community
part-book is built up rehearsal to rehearsal under the
guidance of the composer. In this sense, the homage to
visual artist Boltanski is apt, since the work is such
that “everyone can do my work for me, once I give
the rules,” to quote Boltanski.

With
that said, it is important to note that the final score
is constructed last, after the groups involved have made
their decisions with their conductors and performed the
work from the part-books. This is the opposite of a traditional
score where a composer composes a score before he or she
has heard it played. In the case of LOST, the final
score the jury is looking at consists of a snapshot of
the work. When the work is performed again (ideally) the
community decisions will be different and new part-books
are constructed with new children and different ensembles;
for example, the work has been performed in the street
on street corners as well as in churches and concert venues.
It is important to remember the guided improvised aspect
and above all of the tempo e rubato concept that is found
throughout the score. Nonetheless, it is also possible
to perform LOST from the snapshot of the work score
one is looking at, thus taking the work off the street
and out of the community and into the museum – which,
after all, is still useful.

The
Mobile Phone Dreams with LOST is a work
for piano, mobile phones and small ensemble. It shows
how the lost children concept is invading all my work
at the moment. The piece is a dream about a central concept
that has three ideas:

1)
The globalization of the nineties;
2) The mobilization after 2000; and
3) The nomadism of the future as represented by the revolution
of the mobile phone all over the planet.

In my dream, mobile phones ring inside the piano. What comes
out of the phones are the souls of lost children. The work
is a series of panels moving back and forth from dream-piano
to improvised child monograms (circles with ensemble). This
work also contains improvisation, tempo rubato and proportional
notation and as such has slightly different notational outcomes.
It is important to read the score with this mind.

Multiples
and The Lost Project is a 2 CD retrospective of the work
of Rocco Di Pietro. It represents at least twenty years
of work in the cross over between electronic, acoustic,
and improvised musics.